The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Britain's Infernal Cocktail of Hate

by Melanie PhillipsWith the row then still raging over the Lib Dem MP David
Ward’s attack upon Jews for not learning the lessons of the Holocaust and
oppressing the Palestinians, the Sunday Times published last weekend a cartoon
by Gerald Scarfe depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a demonic
builder walling up Palestinians with cement stained red with their blood.

Today, the new acting editor of the Sunday Times, Martin
Ivens, was meeting representatives of British Jews to express his contrition, while
the paper’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself apologised for this ‘grotesque
and offensive’ cartoon.

Ivens, to whom I directly worked for three years when I
wrote for the Sunday Times, is a decent person without a shred of anti-Jewish
or anti-Israel feeling. And the Sunday Times is more supportive of Israel than
most.

Scarfe has expressed regret, but only for unwittingly publishing
the cartoon on Holocaust Memorial Day. Apparently, it would have been
absolutely fine to publish at any other time. Scarfe’s cartoons generally reflect
boiler-plate leftie attitudes. Very likely he would be outraged to be accused
of antisemitism, since in his mind he was only savaging the Israeli Prime Minister
as he does countless other world leaders.

Yet his cartoon did incorporate ancient motifs
of Jew-hatred. So how could he draw such a thing, and how could the Sunday Times
have published it?

The answer to the last question is as yet unknown; very
often, however, such debacles occur as a result of decisions which fall through
the cracks as part of deadline-pressured newspaper life.

Nevertheless, the assumptions behind the drawing of this
cartoon flow directly from the intellectual sewage now poisoning British attitudes
towards Israel and the Middle East.

The cartoon was monstrous because it portrayed
Netanyahu as a psychopath using the blood of Palestinians to cement them into
the evil wall he was building.

It thus fused antisemitic images and grotesque lies
about Israel -- an infernal cocktail which is now the mandatory accessory of
the British intelligentsia, even as this cocktail incites violence and mass
murder by Arabs and Muslims across the world.

Murdering innocents and using their blood for demonic purposes
is the essence of the ancient antisemitic ‘blood libel’, which fuelled the medieval
Christian pogroms and is now regularly used in the Arab and Muslim world to incite
its demented hatred of Jews.

As for the cartoon’s message, it is simply obscene to
accuse Netanyahu of brutally murdering Palestinians. It is Palestinians who set
out to murder Jews, something the security ‘wall’ – actually mostly a wire
fence – aims to prevent. And in its military actions against Palestinian mass
murderers, Israel goes to heroic lengths -- unknown in any other country -- to
try to shield the innocent from harm.

So Scarfe’s
message is a Big Lie about Israel. As I wrote here, it is
these Big Lies reversing victim and aggressor in the Middle East which are so obscene.

And the fusion of such bigotry against Israel with bigotry
against Jews is characteristic of Israel-hatred, which does indeed represent a
modern mutation of antisemitism.This is why.

Antisemitism has certain specific features
which make it a unique form of bigotry. It is founded upon unshakeable beliefs
which are in fact total lies; it is deeply irrational and immune to factual
evidence; it accuses Jews of atrocities of which they are not only innocent but
of which they are in fact the victims; it singles them out for double standards
by expecting them to behave in ways expected of no-one else; it holds falsely
that they form global conspiracies of manipulative influence; and it is utterly,
pathologically obsessive about the Jews and their alleged cosmic misdeeds.

All these characteristic apply to Israel-hatred. Which
is why those who give vent to it can’t seem to avoid reaching for the stereotypes
and calumnies of ancient Jew-hatred. Reasoned criticism of Israel is entirely
legitimate; but this pathological Israel-hatred is fundamentally anti-Jew.

That does not mean that all those who give
expression to it are themselves necessarily hostile to Jews. Some undoubtedly
are; others may think about Jews
benignly with one part of their brain, but towards Israel they feel only an
overwhelming, implacable, obsessional hatred.

Such people have unwittingly bought into a discourse about
Israel based on Jew-hatred. They may well be quite unaware of this, being
ignorant of the historical resonances.
But that does not alter the fact they are voicing the latest mutation of
Jew-hatred – from theology to race, and now to nation. And the fact that
ancient antisemitic imagery bubbles up in their minds without their even
realising what it is makes this no less horrifying.

A heated discussion on BBC Radio’s Today Programme
this morning between the Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard and the Guardian
cartoonist Steve Bell all too vividly illustrated the uniquely sanctimonious
venom, ignorance and humbug of the Israel-hater.

Bell was himself at the centre of a similar controversy
last year when the Guardian published his
cartoon showing Netanyahu as a puppeteer manipulating both Tony Blair and
Britain’s current Foreign Secretary William Hague, against the background of bombs
represented as Israeli flags.

Bell’s irritated defence this morning of his own cartoon
was risible – apparently Netanyahu was not a ‘puppet-master’ because the
figures of Blair and Hague were merely ‘pathetic’; nor could the cartoon have presented
Jews as ‘manipulative evil geniuses’ since it wasn’t about Jews at all, only
Netanyahu.

It is of course possible that Bell simply doesn’t
understand the enduring significance of the antisemitic image of Jews as master-puppeteers
manipulating the world for their own evil ends. But then he said this:

‘The problem with the state of Israel and the Zionist
lobby is that they never acknowledge the crime of ethnic cleansing on which the
state was founded.’

So his target was not just Netanyahu but the very
existence of the State of Israel. Now we can see what actually lay behind his
cartoon and his outraged defence of it. For Bell, Israel is itself a tyrannical
entity which perpetrated the greatest possible atrocity upon the supposedly
rightful inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, by driving them out. For
Bell, it is now clear, the outrage is not the behaviour of Netanyahu but the
fact that Israel exists at all.

But of course, Bell’s belief is the very opposite of
the truth. It was not the Arabs who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine; it
was the Arabs who tried to ethnically cleanse the Jews from there, by
mounting a war of extermination against the re-established Jewish homeland. It
was the Jews, not the Arabs, who were the ethnic group with the overwhelming historical,
moral and legal claim to the land, as the international community had
recognised. And it was Jews – some 800,000 of them -- who really were then
ethnically cleansed from Arab countries and who found refuge in Israel.

But then Bell does not appear to understand the moral
difference between tyrants and their victims. For he also observed that no-one
had objected to Scarfe’s cartoon the previous week which portrayed Syria’s
President Assad slicing the head off a baby. It is certainly true that Scarfe has
often drawn such images of Assad, such as this
one, or this
one, and regularly depicts tyrants steeped in blood.

But the crucial point is that Netanyahu is not a
tyrant who murders innocents; Assad is. Netanyahu is defending his
people against mass murder; Assad has been deliberately killing thousands of
his own citizens in order to suppress revolution. Bell’s comparison is morally
obtuse to a quite staggering degree. He appears not to understand the difference
between a crime against humanity and the protection against a crime
against humanity.

Last weekend’s cartoon was the third in recent years published
by a UK national newspaper to have grotesquely libelled Israel and drawn upon
antisemitic imagery to do so. The first in this series of shame, by Dave Brown in
the Independent in 2003, depicted a monstrous Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime
Minister, biting the head off a Palestinian baby. It was another blood libel –
yet Brown disingenuously claimed it was merely a pastiche of Goya’s painting Saturn
Devouring His Children.

In a pointed comment, Britain’s cartoon establishment honoured
Brown’s drawing by designating it Political Cartoon of the Year. Today, the
LibDems have merely given David Ward a mild rap over the knuckles in a yellow card censure.
Scarfe and Bell will continue to have their cartoons published, and will continue
to be lionised, as if nothing had happened; and Britain’s intelligentsia, BBC
and other media will continue to paint Israel as brutal aggressors and the
Palestinians as their victims.

When future historians come to record Britain’s tragic
decline, they will surely place its sickening behaviour towards the Jewish
people, first under its control in Palestine and then in the State of Israel,
as both symptom and cause of its moral and civilisational collapse.

2 comments:

This is a media warfare. Obviously the anti-Israel propaganda is gaining ground for decades. Where are the prominent pro-Israel journalists in leading news papers. As long as they are weak or even non existing in leading media, the truth of the Israeli side will be more and more ousted, until that truth no longer matters and in its entirety is twisted. We should know that by now. Even when this article is excellent, it should be published in leading newspapers and repeated over and over again. But it doesn't ...